


The "Cogitata Gnostici et Mundo Logici" of Kdjathskezir

by Ciretako



Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: Gen, Lore - Freeform, apocrypha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-09 09:28:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27348901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ciretako/pseuds/Ciretako
Summary: An Elder Scrolls apocrypha text (i.e. fanlore piece) which I'd written in around 2017. The goal was to synthesise a few different Elder Scrolls lore concepts which each were well-accepted individually but which I'd thought hadn't quite been brought together yet within the Elder Scrolls lore community, and also to sneak in a few allusions to an outside work as well as explorations of concepts of my own along the way. The result is an ancient philosophical treatise of the Dwemer which sees one of their earliest recorded scholars looking upon the strangeness of this world and finding affirmation of the ultimate irreality of this world.The text is presented in the style of one of the lore texts you'd find within an Elder Scrolls gameworld; representing a character skimming through it by seeing it abridged to its most key passages and with the lengthiest of those passages summarised rather than reproduced.I choose not to use AO3's archive rating system as I don't feel comfortable making blanket judgments about whom my writings are appropriate for, but I believe that no content warnings are applicable to this piece.
Comments: 1
Collections: /fanfic/ Collected Works





	The "Cogitata Gnostici et Mundo Logici" of Kdjathskezir

**The _Cogitata Gnostici et Mundo Logici_ ("Thoughts on Mythopoetic Knowledge and the Logic of the Firmament," as rendered in Church Alessian) of Kdjathskezir**

_An ancient Dwemeri discourse on the natural philosophies with a foreword presented by a modern scholar of history, one Irsmund Krestleifsolf._

_In Krestleifsolf's foreword he leisurely traces the text's original publication, its translation under a number of different names into the Chimeri written language (at that point just starting to diverge from their ancestral Aldmeri script) and into the Nordic oral tradition soon after, its eventual ubiquity across a Tamriel of Eras past, the debates that have been spurred over the nature of the concept of "mortal reckoning" that it discusses, and its status as one of the first texts to be censored in virtually every age of intellectual and mythopoetic suppression._

_The text itself is one that, "through different lenses," Krestleifsolf remarks, "has inspired between a hundred and eight and a thousand and eight different ideologies." Despite its lacking the scientific rigour that later came to define the Dwemer and despite that, as he puts it, some of its ideological content has been discredited Eras ago, he asserts that its insights hold as true in Tamriel today and with as much relevance to the intellectual problems of the Third Era as it had in the Tamriel it was written in and to those of the Late Merethic._

_..._  
**On Nirnian Geography**  
_..._  
For the purpose of the Moons' rotation, Nirn must behave like a sphere - and yet if Nirn is a sphere then it is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If in the Chimeri ritual a suitably-pacified avatar of the greater spirits is summoned, it will recall for its summoners vividly its memory of the meetings of the Aedra and their lesser Earth-Bones at Convention: The planning not of a sphere but of a Plane of Creation, bound to no innate physical laws (no laws of rotation) but instead only to those laws in the images of which the Earth-Bones have artificially been recast and their greater Aedra have artificially been remoulded.

The problem of the Kalpas, an avatar of Azura has recently asserted, was recognised in Convention too - that the spacetime of Mundus would be such a malleable product of artifice that a mortal on a magically-guided ship would be able to transcend it entirely and travel through time itself over seas of infinite breadth, depth, and age to worlds unknown to that mortal's own history. The response of all attending when (or if) that problem was raised was a barely-reluctant answer of "such are our capacities."

All these facts of protohistory a spirit in a state of ara-mitama, too, will assert if it still has enough of a mortal Soul infused into it to grant it the power of mortal speech.  
_..._  
**On the Shape of the Soul**  
_..._  
If one of the great martial artists of the Chimer were to slice open one of a spirit's Nirnian embodiments with his (ou-)katana, or his partner's (ko-)naginata, what would he find inside? The transcendent power of The Aether, leaving each Soul that watches trembling as it shines forth from the now-dissected mandala made of it? It seems unlikely. Such power is antithetical to the nature of what Mundus is at least supposed to resemble, and so to the Soul of what Mundus is to resemble; so it seems to this author that what such a martial artist would find at the heart of such a being would be that which in turn resembles such an atemporal, aspatial spiritual essence - but which truly owes its essence to the essentially mortal reckoning needed to give such spiritual essence actual definition in our at least partially temporal, at least partially spatial world.  
_..._  
**On Mirrors, the Screen and the Shape of the Society**  
_..._  
So many of the components of Mundus are but a reflected image of something in which we can not in turn see the reflection of Mundus.

Is Mundus in its totality that which we are made to see in Mundus, or is it but another hollow reflection; another imperfect mould or imperfect casting? Perhaps in the latter case it can be said that the role in which the Folk of Mundus have been cast is to, somehow, and despite our being cast as imperfectly as Mundus is moulded, make of Mundus that which Mundus by itself fails to be. Perhaps what is to be revered most of all is that which multiplies and disseminates that truer realm of which Mundus is but a hollow reflection; that which can embody the cardinal laws of the Soul and the Oversoul where the imitation or anticipation of those laws that is offered in Mundus (or in perhaps any of the anticipations or other protonyms of Mundus that were once known, that are now known, and that will be known by the beings the Earth-Bones were once cast as) can not.  
_..._

_Krestleifsolf provides an afterword comparing the ideas proclaimed in the text with the philosophies that would define the further development of Dwemer society. A brief note is made of Dwemer-Hist cultural exchange, of the catastrophe that had occurred for the Hist in the creation of The New Medium as the result of a caste of Dwemeri-Argonians having been among the peoples to have found Rapture in the Brass God’s reification, and of the loss of knowledge for the societies of the time and for the individual of the time both that had resulted as the Dwemer disappeared from Known Aurbis._


End file.
